The Trump administration proposed granting federal and local election officials, as well as nonprofits, access to sensitive passport records to conduct voter citizenship checks.
The State Department proposal, first reported by Bloomberg News on Friday, would explicitly add “voter eligibility” to the list of uses for which the department maintains passport records. The plan lists federal, state, tribal and local government agencies, along with unspecified nonprofit organizations, as potential recipients of passport data.
The proposed rule is highly unlikely to take effect until after the Nov. 3 midterms, though it combines with President Donald Trump’s ongoing push to assert federal authority over maintaining state voter rolls to remove noncitizens — a campaign his administration says is necessary to prevent voter fraud, which is extremely rare.
The records system at the center of the State Department’s proposal stores Americans’ sensitive personal documents, including passport applications, birth certificates, copies of driver’s licenses, and medical and financial data.
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The draft notice specifies that data can be shared with the government and nonprofits “for the purpose of verifying the identity or citizenship for users accessing government websites and applications, voter eligibility, and other governmental services,” but falls short of specifying which nonprofits or government agencies would receive the passport records, or which records they would receive.
The Privacy Act allows records to be shared for narrower purposes, like law enforcement and employment verification and identity checks, but voter eligibility is not a listed use. However, the Supreme Court on Friday allowed the government to move forward with its modified immigration database, which contains citizens’ Social Security information and other individual data — despite an earlier lower court ruling that found that the updated system violated federal privacy laws.
Earlier this week, the Justice Department informed a judge of the new State Department plan as part of an ongoing legal battle over Trump’s March executive order seeking to curb mail-in voting rules. A federal district court had explicitly ordered the DOJ to update it on any “material factual developments” while the litigation remains pending.
The State Department has already notified the relevant congressional committees of the proposed passport data sharing provisions, according to the DOJ’s disclosure to the court.
The State Department proposal will soon be published to the federal register and eventually undergo a 30-day public comment period.
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